All this took more than ten minutes, but Crane had been given several objectives, and he’d been ordered to be perfectly thorough.
Soon all four were back out on the pool deck. The swimming pool water was bright pink now. On Crane’s command, Wigeon unzipped his backpack and took out three small bags of high-quality cocaine. He tossed these in the grass near the fence, with the intention that the drugs would be found with the bodies and this entire event would appear to be a nefarious deal gone bad.
That none of the men had any drugs in their bodies could be explained by the fact that the deal had gone belly-up and the guns came out before anyone had time to partake in the drugs.
Finally Crane ordered everyone but Snipe back to the safe house, and the six men departed.
After they gave them time to get clear, Crane and Snipe stood on the side of the beautiful pool and unscrewed the silencers from their FN Five-seveNs. These they slipped into their backpacks. Then they aimed their weapons high above the horizon to the south, just below the hazy half-moon, and then both men opened fire.
They fired individual rounds and short volleys in a chaotic cadence, until both weapons were empty and the handguns’ slides locked open. They then quickly reloaded, holstered their guns, and kicked the fallen spent shell casings in all directions. Some of the hot brass fell into the bloody pool, where it sank to the bottom; other casings rolled into the grass; and more rolled farther away along the decorative concrete deck.
As dogs barked in the neighborhood and lights flipped on up and down East Quail Avenue and South Hedgeford Court, Crane and Snipe walked calmly but quickly down the driveway. They used a pedestrian gate by the main drive gate and then walked out onto the street.
The front door of a home across the street opened, a woman in a bathrobe stood backlighted by the overhead fixture in her entryway, and Snipe drew his pistol and fired twice at her, sending her back inside, crawling frantically to safety.
In seconds a gray panel truck pulled up and the two men climbed into the van. It rolled north, heading to I-15. While Grouse drove and the other men sat silently, Crane pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons. After a long wait for a connection and an answer, he said, “All objectives achieved.”
TWENTY-TWO
Sitting alone in front of a bank of glowing computer monitors in a glass office that overlooked a massive floor of open cubicle workspaces, a forty-eight-year-old Chinese man in a rumpled white shirt and a loose necktie nodded in satisfaction at Crane’s news.
“Begin uploading data as soon as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” said Crane.
“Shi-shi”—thank you — the man in the office replied.
Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, code name Center, tapped the secure voice-over Internet earpiece in his right ear to disconnect the call. He looked out past his monitors toward the open office floor and considered his next play. He decided to make the quick walk across the operations floor to the workspace of his best coder to let him know DarkGod’s data would be coming in shortly from America.
Normally he would simply touch a button on his desk and talk to the young man via videoconference, but he knew a personal visit would encourage the coder to take this matter seriously.
Tong looked around his spotlessly clean office. Though there were no pictures of family or other personal items in view, a small, unframed cardstock sign hung from the glass door to the hallway.
It was written in flowing Chinese calligraphy, the characters one above the other in a single vertical row. Taken from the Book of Qi, a history of China from AD 479 to 502, the line was one of the thirty-six stratagems, an essay about deception for politics, war, and human interaction.
Tong read the words aloud: “Jie dao sha ren.” Kill with a borrowed knife.
Although his unit of operatives in the United States had just killed on his behalf, Tong knew he himself was the borrowed knife.
Not much gave him pleasure, his brain had been virtually programmed by the state so that it did not respond to such banal stimuli as pleasure, but his operation was on track, and this satisfied Dr. Tong.
He stood and left his dark office.
Tong Kwok Kwan was from Beijing originally, the only child of a union between two Soviet-trained mathematicians who worked in China’s then-fledgling ballistic missile program.
Kwok Kwan had no Princeling pedigree, but his brilliant parents pushed academics upon him relentlessly, focusing his attention and his studies on mathematics. He consumed workbooks and textbooks as a child, but he reached adolescence in the early days of the personal computer, and his family saw immediately that his future lay in the near limitless power of the incredible machines.
Because of his good grades, the state sent him to the best schools, and then to the best universities. He went to the United States to heighten his abilities in computer programming, to MIT in 1984, and then to Caltech for his master’s in 1988.
After Caltech, Tong came home and taught programming for a few years at China’s University of Science and Technology, before beginning a doctoral program in computer science at the prestigious Peking University in Beijing.
By now the concentration of his studies was the Internet and the new World Wide Web — specifically, their vulnerabilities and the ramifications of these vulnerabilities in any future conflict with the West.
In 1995, while a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate, he wrote a paper titled “World War Under Conditions of Informationization.” Almost immediately the paper made its way from the world of Chinese academia to the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security. The Chinese government classified the document top-secret, and immediately MSS operatives fanned out into any institutions of higher learning where the paper had been distributed, picking up hard copies, retrieving floppy disks containing the work, and giving long, intense, and intimidating talks with any professor or student who had come into contact with it.
Tong was immediately brought to Beijing, and within weeks he was lecturing the military and intelligence communities on how to leverage cyberoperations against China’s enemies.
The generals, colonels, and spymasters were in over their heads in Tong’s lectures, since the arcane terminology used by the brilliant young man was difficult for them to follow, but they realized they had, in Tong, a valuable resource. He was handed his doctorate and placed in charge of a small but powerful cyberwarfare testing, training, and development group within the MSS, and he was also given responsibility over PLA and MSS computer defensive operations.
But Tong was not content to run teams of government computer network operators. He saw more potential for power in the harnessing of the individual and independent Chinese computer hacker. He formed an organization of independent Chinese hackers in 1997 called the Green Army Alliance. Under his direction they targeted websites and networks of China’s enemies, achieving intrusions and registering some damage. Although their impact was relatively minor, it showed that his academic paper could, in fact, be implemented in the real world, and it only increased his cachet even more.
Later he started the Information Warfare Militia, a collection of civilians in the technology industry and academia who worked independently but under the direction of PLA’s Third Department (Signals Intelligence).